Bill Gilbert: Artist Archive

New Mexico artist Bill Gilbert completed his undergraduate work in studio art at Swarthmore College and Pitzer College in southern California, where he studied with ceramist Dennis Parks. Gilbert received his MFA from the University of Montana in 1978 and has served on the faculty in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico since 1988. He held the Lannan Chair as founding director of the Land Arts of the American West program and subsequently was cofounder of the university’s Art & Ecology emphasis in studio art. He has exhibited his place-based, mixed media, and video works in galleries and museums across the world, including at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. He is also a curator and writer focusing on indigenous artists from U.S. pueblos, Mexico, and Ecuador. In 2009 he coauthored, with Chris Taylor, Land Arts of the American West (University of Texas Press) and in 2012 published Arid Lands Pedagogy: Art in the American West (Routledge).

Bill Gilbert’s work in ceramics is the basis for all his other practices, including Land Art performances and installations, teaching, research fieldwork, and his curation of indigenous materials, most notably the contemporary pots of Mata Ortiz, an Hispanic village in northern Chihuahua where Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo traditions combine to create an internationally known ceramic movement. Land Arts of the American Wet, which Gilbert founded in 2000, is an early and frequently emulated field-based artmaking academic program, the archives from which the Center collects annually.

Materials include journals, research and field materials, slides/photographs, publications, press clipping of ceramics work, installations and performances, development of the Land Arts of the American West program, and work with the Mata Ortiz pottery community in northern Mexico.

• CAE1902: Land Arts of the American West CAE1501: Boundless Horizons: A Land Art Exhibition